


Aftermath

by TheAmazingOntos



Series: Change [14]
Category: No Fandom
Genre: Magic Revealed, Mild Language, POV First Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-24
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-10 20:00:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28292760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheAmazingOntos/pseuds/TheAmazingOntos
Summary: I end up back in the hospital
Series: Change [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1960861





	Aftermath

"Get off me. You're drooling," a muffled voice says, sounding vaguely familiar, but I can't place it. Then the world tilts, and the floor rushes up to meet me, and it hurts. 

"Wha?" I ask from halfway under the bench I was sitting on, completely disoriented and feeling a little ill. There's someone yelling at me, but I don't recognise them, even though I feel like I should. It's raising a feeling of not-quite panic in me, because I'm sure that this person is important, somehow.

Suddenly, this and any other thoughts are all cleared up, as the mystery woman slaps me with a resounding crack. "Vergil, answer me when I'm talking to you, damnit. How dare you come here, fall asleep and drool on me after the way you've been behaving all day? Are you even listening to me?" Her voice steadily rises during this, and she's practically screaming in my face by the end of it. 

All I can do is stare in shock and mute terror at this angry woman standing over me. I don't know who she is, but not only does she know me, but she's comfortable enough for casual abuse, which makes her my caretaker or wife. A caretaker wouldn't get so emotionally charged over something simple that happened, which leaves the impossible, that being that I managed to marry.

She storms off before I can answer, leaving me alone in a small rock garden with a fountain, with no sign of anyone else being near. I pull myself to my feet and go through the door the woman walked through, while trying to avoid notice. If she is typical of the people in this place, then I would be best off not garnering their attention. 

I have that same sense of deja-vu as I walk through the building, towards what I instinctively know is the front entrance. My escape is cut short, however, as Austin finds me walking past the now abandoned front desk. 

"Vergil, I've heard that you've been acting strangely since you killed that guy earlier. The problem is that everyone forgets you spent the entire Change period in a cocoon, and that you're not as accustomed to the violence. All I'm saying is, don't worry about it. We'll get you to a counsellor and everything will work out," he tells me, but I've missed everything after the part where I killed a person.

He keeps on talking some more, right up to the point where I fall flat on the floor. It's getting harder to concentrate on anything, and trying to follow what he was saying distracted me from maintaining my admittedly increasingly precarious balance. For a while after that, everything is bright lights and loud noises, disconnected from each other and making no sense, either apart or as a whole. 

\-----

"He wasn't supposed to leave the hospital for another two weeks. The implanted material is still regrowing his brain, and the functions aren't localised to their correct regions yet. Add in the fact that he's a mage, and your brains are more built up in certain areas to process the harnessing of magic, and it's a wonder that he could even speak. He'll need to stay in the sensory deprivation tank until it's done, under sedation to avoid new pathways overwriting the ones that he already made," a speaker grille mounted into the side of the tank they stuck Vergil in says. 

I've never liked autodocs, partly because they left me with some scars on my face and along my left side(don't get me wrong, they look awesome, but they get annoying sometimes). I dislike autodocs more because they're dead people who I can't control. The first was a damned doctor in Japan, who had the bright idea to become a lich and get an artificer to give him arms controlled by his soul trap so he could keep working. 

We can't bend liches to our will, even though Austin claims he did it once. He's not as strong a necromancer as me, and I can't do it, even with a triple circle and physical anchors. Mainly, Austin is so full of shit that his eyes are brown and flies buzz around his empty skull. The bindings the artificers machine into the soul traps are seriously heavy duty, and I don't think even they know what all of them mean. The guy who designed it originally died before he could trap his own soul, ironically, and can't be called up, so we may never find out. 

"Whatever, tin can, just get him back in one piece, or I'll melt your soul trap down and bind your shade to a dead rat. It won't be pleasant, I promise," Emily says to the air, knowing that there are microphones somewhere around. 

I walk back to the rest of the group, already trying to figure out how to explain this mess. Everyone is worried, especially Shivani, since they were starting to become a thing. I'm not sure it's a good idea, mainly because Vergil has a lot of baggage from previous relationships, and she's a powerful water witch who senses emotions pretty strongly. That's neither here nor there for me, since he needs to get out of the hospital first. 

"Okay, Vergil's brain wasn't done regrowing, and the trauma from earlier today short circuited it. They're keeping him in a tank until it's done, and hopefully his consciousness survives the transfer into the new material. He wasn't supposed to leave the hospital, but he got out anyway, and there's nothing we can do anymore, so relax and don't panic," I pronounce in a confident manner, while feeling anything but.

"If it's alright, I'll stay with him tonight," Shivani whispers, while looking down and trying to hide her tears. She feels guilty about hitting and leaving him out in the garden, but it's not healthy for her to stay here. The strain from all the emotions could be the end of her, and I can't allow that.

"Nobody can stay tonight, they have work to do on him. We'll come back tomorrow instead," I tell her as I lead her away. Austin and Alyssa fall in behind us, and we leave an incapacitated Vergil in his dark capsule for a second time.


End file.
